Where did the Northwest’s moisture go?

For years I’ve hated the
winter rains of Oregon’s Willamette Valley — hated the
way they start in late October and continue well into April.

Soaking the landscape and leaving everything wrinkled and
rotted, the rain was something to hide from, something to make me
hold my breath, shut my eyes and imagine a drier world. But this
year, the rains haven’t come, and for what may be the first
time, I find myself praying for water.

In the beginning
of February, federal scientists traveled to Mount Hood to measure
the year’s snowpack. After taking samples and making
measurements, the scientists confirmed what the locals already
knew: The pack was low, 19 percent of normal low. According to
these same scientists, as reported by Oregon Public Broadcasting,
it is possible, but not likely, that heavy storms during February
and March could make up for the shortcomings of the early winter
months. They say it would take 240 percent of the average snowfall
to do it, and I say, we’re quickly running out of time.

This is the first winter I've experienced where the ski
resorts closed in January because of lack of snow and where the
daffodils began blooming the first week in February. In past years
the rains were something we Oregonians would comment on without
much emotion, but for the last several months conversations have
followed an unusual path.

"Awfully nice day," I might say
to the clerk at the grocery.

"It sure is," she replies.
"Can you believe 60 degrees in January?"

"I know;
it’s beautiful, but it sure isn’t normal," I counter as
she bags my carrots.

"Nope, not normal at all," she says
as I hand her a twenty. "It’s gonna be a long summer the way
we’re going," I say as I get my change and head for the door.

"It could get ugly," she says. "You enjoy that sunshine
today."

It’s the last two lines that have me
worried, those ambiguous thoughts about the future, about the
upcoming summer and what it will bring. These worries have me
looking at the sky, scouting for dark clouds.

Without
adequate snowpack in the Cascades, our region’s rivers,
fields and people will suffer. I envision dry waterways, native
salmon runs unable to return to the streams of their birth. I see
failed crops, brown fields and a losing battle between small
farmers and out-of-state growers. I picture wildfires beginning in
May, raging for months across the West, and finally dying out
because there is simply nothing left to burn.

Maybe
I’m being dramatic. There have been dry years before, but for
some reason I can’t stop thinking about this year. It’s
a strange year, because California is receiving record amounts of
precipitation, snowfall in Utah is close to breaking records, while
here in the Northwest ski resorts are closing and reservoirs are
pitifully low. A year where, as the clerk says, "It could get
ugly."

NASA scientists just released a study that says
2005 may well be the warmest year on record, since records began
being kept in the 1800s. The National Weather Service’s
recent U.S. Seasonal Drought Outlook shows an "enhanced risk for
drought development in the Pacific Northwest," through April. This
in an area that is famous for its rain — an area whose
residents are sometimes referred to as mossbacks.

I guess
my question is, Is this normal, this lack of rain in areas where it
has previously been plentiful, and an excess of moisture in places
that are notoriously dry? Is it something that regularly occurs in
a healthy system?

Or is something wrong? Is something out
of balance? Is it a product of global warming and greenhouse gas
emissions? Or is it simply a funny year for weather, and whether
it’s normal or not, how will we make it without the rain?

I don’t know the answer to my questions. I
don’t know if there are answers to some of them. But I think
the questions themselves are worth talking about. I think
it’s up to all of us who live here, who have our hearts and
our livelihoods invested here, to try to understand what a season
without water could mean for our farmers and our fish, for our
parents and our children, and for the land we call home.

Aimee Brown is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado
(hcn.org). She lives and writes in Corvallis,
Oregon.